Hundreds of Tatars Riot in Crimea After Mobsters Kill 2 Vendors

Angered by the slaying of two market vendors who refused to pay bribes, hundreds of Crimean Tatars rioted in six towns, kidnaped a police chief and tried to march on the Crimean capital before dispersing Monday following all-night negotiations with Ukrainian officials.

Two rioters died in Sunday’s violence. Like the two vendors killed Friday, they belonged to the militant, Turkic-speaking Tatar minority that is returning to Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula after decades of forced exile in Central Asia.

Unlike Russia and many other former Soviet republics, Ukraine has avoided serious ethnic strife. Ukrainian and Tatar leaders sought Monday to portray the bloodshed in Crimea as a popular uprising against police corruption and organized crime.

“We are very worried that this is going to be depicted as an inter-ethnic conflict,” said Mustafa Jemiloglu, the Tatar leader who helped end the rioting. “What we are worried about is that local authorities have sold out to the mafia.”

The trouble started, he said, when Crimean mobsters killed two young Tatar men for refusing to pay corrupt police to protect their village market stalls outside the city of Feodosiya.

Their joint funeral Sunday turned into a riot of revenge. About 500 enraged Tatar men boarded a caravan of cars and buses and rampaged through Feodosiya, smashing windows and firebombing stores, bars, kiosks and a collective-farm house believed to be linked to the guilty gang.

He was later released.

Gunfire killed two of the rioters near the town of Sudak.